Martin Scorsese will appreciate the timeless, sinister malevolence at the heart of this restored, all-American horror movie directed in 1955 by the brilliant British actor Charles Laughton.

Already a best actor Oscar winner in 1934 for The Private Life of Henry VIII, The Night of the Hunter was so far ahead of its time when released that few critics respected its power and it duly became such a financial disaster that Laughton was never trusted to direct again.

Opening at BFI Southbank, The Night... is replete with an extraordinary range of visual ideas.

They lace together a multi-faceted plot dominated by the shockingly manipulative ‘preacher’ Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum).

He is after the money that only two young children know about following the hanging of their father Ben Harper (Peter Graves, later of TV series Mission: Impossible).

And he will seemingly stop at nothing to get it.

With Love and Hate tattooed on his vast knuckles, this is a career-best performance from the great Mitchum, even though he was so good as Max Cady in Cape Fear (1962) that Scorsese remade it with Robert De Niro in 1991.

Here, Laughton manages to find shades of lightness and humour in a dark film that would have even had Frankenstein’s monster running for cover.

After the over-cooked, white water barrel sequence in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, I defy anyone to say they don’t prefer the more atmospheric river scenes here in which the two children are trying to escape by boat while Mitchum follows on his horse.

Scarborough born – like fellow Oscar-winner Sir Ben Kingsley – Laughton was nominated again in 1958 for his performance in Witness for the Prosecution.

But after playing Gracchus in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960), he died in Hollywood in 1962 aged just 63.